A former visiting fellow at Harvard University said she and 11 other people were detained on July 23 by police in Beijing for trying to hold a forum on rural democracy.

Wenzhuo Hou, a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School in the Human Rights Program from 2001 to 2003 and an activist who heads the organization Earth and Rights (EAR), said that approximately 10 police entered her home—which doubles as her office—early that morning.

A non-governmental organization that “focuses on protecting the human rights of disadvantaged groups in China—farmers, migrant workers, and petitioners seeking for justice, among others,” EAR planned to host a discussion forum centered on “the controversies and difficulties surrounding the issue of village self-governance,” according to a press release issued by EAR.

The forum planned to host a number of speakers, including several village chiefs and farmers’ rights representatives, who were to share their stories.

Wenzhuo and several others were putting the finishing touches on the discussion slated for that afternoon, her assistant Chen “Orange” Songzhu wrote.

The officers insisted on checking their identification information and then combed through her home, Wenzhuo wrote.

“When I tried to make a phone call, a police [sic] twisted my arm and grabbed my phone,” she wrote.

She, her three assistants, peasants and farmers’ representatives were ultimately arrested and detained with no explanation.

“They just said this was by the order from a higher official,” Chen wrote. “The police officer said they do so because we invited a lot of foreign mediums we want to show the bad things of China to the foreign country we want the government lose face in front of the international society [sic].”

But Wenzhuo said her status as a noted human rights activist automatically gave her some leeway with the police.

“All the other 11 people were not given lunch, starving the whole day,” Wenzhuo wrote. “However I was given a lunch same as what the police had.”

But Wenzhuo characterized the arrests as unreasonable and speculated that her actions had been monitored.

“I still do not fully understand...why they took such a drastic action,” she wrote. “I had organized six other discussion forums, on other issues related to civil rights, protection of private property.”

But—given the political implications of the forum—Merle D. Goldman, an associate of the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, said that the Beijing police’s actions were not surprising.

“Any one organizing a [forum] that has political implications, can run into trouble with the Public Security Bureau, China’ equivalent of the Soviet Union’s KGB,” Goldman wrote. “One can organize a sewing group on one’s own or even an environmental group, but not a group whose purpose is directly political, even when it takes place in one’s home.”